Flights of fancy: An enchanting history of ornithology

Watch the birdie&colon; ornithology has been a major shaper of zoology (Image&colon; Alex Badyaev/tenbestphotos.com)

The excellent Ten Thousand Birds takes us from the obsessive bird collectors of Darwin’s time to the fully fledged scientists of today

MY GRANDDAD had a card series of flags of all nations, all under glass. As a child I was struck by the birds on the various flags – Mexico’s eagle, Ecuador’s condor, Uganda’s crowned crane and so on – and by how each bird’s perceived grace, fierceness or nobility made it a reflection of how a state saw itself.

Four decades on, my back garden is full of everything from pigeon-grabbing falcons and seed-crushing finches to banana-billed toucans and jewel-bright hummingbirds. Their songs, nests, mysterious migrations, even just the act of flying, all enchant, taunt, intrigue and tell of another world, ancient, important, and proceeding by non-human rules and rhythms.

It is their capacity to connect, to capture our emotions, that helps make birds so enchanting. It probably also explains why they have contributed more to the study of zoology than almost any other group of animals – and in the process transformed the nature of the field.

It is their capacity to connect, to capture our emotions, that helps make birds so enchanting

In Ten Thousand Birds&colon; Ornithology since Darwin, Tim Birkhead, Jo Wimpenny and Bob Montgomerie track ornithology from its mid-19th-century origins as a rich man’s hobby, through the infiltration of the scientific method into bird studies as museums rose to prominence, and then the museums’ role in the gradual transformation of natural history into natural sciences. This is a transition so complete that ornithology is now firmly rooted in the academic mainstream, and its studies of evolutionary processes such as sexual selection and biogeography serve as models for zoology in general.

Starting out when bird study was a sort of private, feathered stamp-collecting, we learn about characters such as British banker and zoologist Lord Walter Rothschild, who had fieldmen dotted around the world, obtaining specimens for his collection that eventually exceeded 300,000 bird skins.

Following such class-based role models, early ornithologists believed that professionalism was vested in museums, yet the fact that they came up with such names as superb lyrebird, splendid fairy-wren, or resplendent quetzal for the birds they studied shows that the beauty of birds could penetrate even the most Victorian reserve.

Those early questions of identifying species and of distribution that kept the gentleman-amateurs busy led to the more detailed enquiries which were to become ecology, physiology, ethology and evolution. Modern methods such as phylogeography, satellite-tracking or isotope-based diet studies would have been unimaginable to those early pioneers, but they would certainly have recognised the constants the authors identify in all avian researchers – boundless curiosity and a love of birds.

Without that love, the story of this transition could have been tedious, or filled with nit-picking minutiae, sending you fast-forwarding in search of the next nice picture. But because it is lovingly well-researched and beautifully written, Ten Thousand Birds is huge without being tome-like, fact-packed without being overwhelming, and has truly breathtaking scope.

As the authors admit, they don’t cover everything, but with 11 chapters ranging from palaeontology, reproductive control and anatomy to instinct, sexual selection and conservation, they have a good try. Each chapter follows conceptual advances in an area, which, taken together, show the development of modern ornithology and its strong influence on science.

In few other fields is it clearer that science is made by people&colon; there is never a pure path waiting for a chosen individual to set a wellington-booted foot upon it and binocular forth to truth and fame. Progress occurs in jumps, stutters and lulls, with false starts and blind ends, and does so both because of, and in many cases, in spite of, the characters involved.

There are moments of true insight with paradigm-shifting grand leaps, and then there is the more pedestrian trundling of season-to-season science. A beautiful example is the chapter on fossil birds. Here the authors tell how entrenched arguments over Archaeopteryx (so perfect a missing link that the discovery of the first fossil just two years after OnThe Origin of Species was published led to accusations of fakery) gradually faded as the true extent of the lineage of feathered dinosaurs became apparent.

But there are also “Eureka!” moments, as when the palaeontologist Storrs Olson decided that birds were really feathered dinosaurs – and the whole game changed.

Or take speciation. Ten Thousand Birds shows how vital technological advances can be. These include cladistics, trinomial classification and gene sequencing – not to mention the insect-killing arsenical soap that ensured bird skins actually reached collectors from the tropics without turning into a box of beetles on the way.

But so, too, are the conceptual changes that occur when different researchers tackle the same problem. The authors show how opinion on what drove the evolution of Galapagos finches swung from food being of little import (argued by evolutionary biologist David Lack, based on a short field study) via a conviction that it was the hardness of food that counted (argued by ornithologist Bob Bowman, from skull musculature studies), to the conclusion of evolutionary biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant, after more than 30 years of study, that it is dynamic, multi-factorial and highly variable.

Then there are singular events and chance&colon; for example, needing money to pay a blackmailing mistress, Rothschild sold his entire bird collection to the American Museum of Natural History in 1931. Many of these birds had been collected in the field by explorer-naturalist Erwin Stresemann and described by Rothschild’s bird curator, Ernst Hartert. The birds were used at the museum by evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr to bring his own kind of revolution to speciation.

Mayr read widely and had a near-photographic memory, and it is often forgotten that he began academic life trying to puzzle out the evolutionary history of birds on South Pacific islands. Today, he is seen as one of the greats. But without Rothschild’s scheming ex-mistress, evolutionary studies might have been very different.

Then we have excerpts from extended conversations with ornithological luminaries, made over decades, which provide crucial extra detail. The personal details and reminiscences are both delightful and genuinely illuminating regarding how the pioneers worked, why they chose the problems they did or found the solutions they did, and what inspired them in the first place.

Now we know that the Cambridge Bird Club thought Peter Grant a very poor ornithologist&colon; “I was allowed to take birds out of a mist net once,” he recalls. And that Robert Ricklefs, who made his name for research on seabirds, could say after decades of work&colon; “I look back on this kaleidoscope of influences and ideas with some amazement, glad… my curiosity about life has not dimmed.” What a shame that no one interviewed Richard Meinertzhagen before he died so that we could find out why, despite being a good ornithologist, he faked data, stole specimens and passed them off as his own.

There have been other histories of ornithology, and the authors have clearly examined them and worked out how to avoid the pitfalls. A clear narrative laid out in the foreword, innovative timelines at the start of each chapter, and lucid, jargon-free writing on technical topics mean that this book is definitive, absorbing and highly recommended. A sentence one can rarely write.